Terry Currier and Music Millennium: The growth, and near-death, of a Portland icon

At some point, everyone faces their moment of truth. The point where circumstances and fate collide head-on with your sense of right and wrong, and everything else hangs in the balance.It's the big character test. The gut-check. The moment where you either cut and run or stand and fight.And when Terry Currier, the bear-framed, curly-locked and black-T-shirted head man at Music Millennium found himself standing on that threshold in 1993, he didn't hesitate.He fired up his barbecue. He gathered up every last Garth Brooks CD, album and tape on his shelves, lugged them to his flaming grill and declared his stores Garth-free zones.With reporters from the Wall Street Journal, People and Billboard magazines, plus camera crews and local reporters watching, Currier put a copy of Brooks' CD, "The Chase," on the grill. And while he stopped short of eating it, he was deadly serious about his beef with the country singer, then fronting the music industry's campaign to end the sale of used CDs and albums.Used products made up less than 5 percent of Music Millennium's sales. But as Currier said at the time, there was a principle at stake. No one was going to tell him, or any retailer, what legal products they couldn't sell.So he took his protest to record stores up and down the West Coast, gathering crowds and reporters at every stop. And by the time he got to Los Angeles a few weeks later, the record companies had surrendered.So goes the rock'n'roll life of Terry Currier, whose years at the helm of Music Millennium turned the store and its owner-operator into an invaluable resource for the Pacific Northwest's music scene and a national leader in the music-selling industry."Music Millennium's influence on Portland music is omnipresent" says Chris Monlux, co-founder of concert producers Monqui. "It was, and remains, the city's go-to place for music." And not just for locals, either. Touring musicians make a beeline for the store when they get to town, he continues."This one guy told me, Portland always means records at Millennium. Like Terry's hairstyle, the song remains the same!"But even as Currier has seen Music Millennium become a national leader, even as their innovations (such as live, in-store performances) grow into national practices, and even as he started his own record label and distribution business, there's no escaping the darker truths of the modern record business. The unceasing growth of digital music sales and trading has pushed Currier, like virtually everyone in the music industry, to the brink of extinction.But Currier pins his faith on something less tangible, and more powerful than the "buy now" button on your computer screen. It's the warmth and wide-ranging expertise of his staff. And more importantly, the way music compels listeners to join together to sing, to listen, to feel the rhythm in their chests at the same time.iTunes can do a lot of things. But that ain't one of them.

Back in the glory days, rock'n'roll doubled as a cultural indicator. To be drawn to music, to internalize the deeper meanings in the lyrics and wear the concert T-shirt was to define your place in the socio-cultural galaxy.

"Record stores were like community centers," Currier says, thinking back to his first adventures in record retailing, as a high school kid working after school in the early '70s. "You see guys meeting around the Who section and then they'd be going off together to listen, then come back as lifelong pals."

Currier's feeling for record stores came in part from how long it had taken him to find his way to them.

Born in 1955 to a salesman and homemaker mom, he'd spent the first 17 years of his life in Burien, the south Seattle suburb next to Sea-Tac airport. He'd come to music through his increasingly successful career as a student of the clarinet and saxophone. Currier was so wrapped up in the private lessons, the all-day summer camp programs and more, he could only assume that he'd end up playing professionally or teaching other serious aspirants at a college.

His fixations began to shift during his junior year in high school, when his family moved to Vancouver, Wash. Removed from his Seattle-based life, Currier found his attention absorbed by an underground radio station he'd found on the AM dial. "KVAN," he says, reciting the station's old announcements. "The monomaniacs!"

Maniacs or not, the station's wide range of music, and the counter-cultural vibe, struck the teenager instantly. He joined a record club (a kind of monthly subscription to new albums, chosen from a limited assortment presented by the club), but when he journeyed to Jantzen Beach to buy tickets to a Leon Russell concert, Currier saw the shiny storefront of an about-to-open outlet for the regional chain D.J.'s Sound City, and his eyes opened wide.

Happily, his dad, a longtime retail supplier, had once worked with Dave Holmes, the shop's incoming manager. Currier wrote a letter asking for a job. and when he came for an interview, Holmes liked what he saw.

"He was a nice, clean-cut kid who was -- and still is -- incredibly diligent," Holmes says.

Currier helped open the store in the summer of 1972, then started dating one of his colleagues. The girl, already a seasoned Portland music store consumer, took Currier to Music Millennium, open for just three years but already renowned for its vast collection of domestic and imported albums.

"I was like, 'Wow! There's all THIS, too!'" says Currier, who soon made a habit of jetting away from D.J.'s just after its 9 p.m. close to spend a few minutes flipping Millennium's stacks before its 10 p.m. close.

"I bought 665 albums that first year," Currier says. Whether the sheer number of albums he bought is more or less impressive than his remembering the precise number is up to you.

Currier stayed with D.J.'s for 12 years, working his way into management -- including a year in the chain's Honolulu store -- peaking with a year as the chief record buyer for the chain. But in the early '80s, the owners sold out to the owners of Tape Town, a chain that focused on stereo systems and other music gear. For a dedicated record store man, the new fit wasn't even close to right.

What to do? Certainly a visit to Music Millennium would clear his head. ...

Ah, Millennium.

Founded by Tektronix engineer Don McLeod, his wife Laureen, her brother Dan Lissy and his wife Patty, and opened on March 15, 1969 -- at precisely 3 p.m. in the afternoon, as dictated by co-owner/astrology enthusiast Dan Lissy -- the shop on East Burnside was the very image of the hippie music store. From the vast inventory to the impassioned clerks to the black-light posters and partially hidden shelves of hand-carved pipes and bongs, it was as much a counter-cultural institution as a retailer.

Fortunately, the record business was on a nonstop roll through the '70s and the '80s, and Millennium expanded with it. The Lissys sold their interest along the way, and in 1979 the McLeods sold the entire operation to a businessman whose interests leaned more toward money than music. At which point, the stores' reputation and monthly sales collapsed. The stores came so close to vanishing altogether that McLeod swooped back in from his country home to buy back the stores.

Hearing that McLeod was looking to hire a manager with the expertise that once defined his store, Currier applied. His interview came in the form of a 200-question quiz about music, musicians and records. When Currier could name the entire lineup, past and present, of the obscure British folk band Fairport Convention, McLeod was satisfied.

The store's credit rating and reputation had crashed in the McLeod-less era, but Currier's diligence, along with his personal contacts with the record companies' sales reps, got things moving in the right direction. And as McLeod edged back to country life, Currier bought a larger ownership stake. The stores ploughed into 1989, their 20th anniversary year, in a celebratory mood. Having 40 days of live, in-store performances proved so popular it grew into a regular feature, then became an industry standard at independent music stores around the nation.

With nothing but green lights ahead, Currier opened his own record company, then tossed in a distribution company to help other independent companies get their albums to the East Coast and beyond. Currier beat back the ban on used-record sales in 1993, then founded and helped build the national trade organization for independent music stores. Everything had been going so well for so long, no one even imagined the disaster headed toward the music industry.

Destruction, thy name was Napster. The free music-trading site came online in 2000. And though Napster vanished in short order, Apple's iTunes appeared in 2001, touching off the era of mainstream, commercialized digital distribution.

Formats had come and gone for decades -- remember 78s, 45s and long-playing vinyl albums? Remember 8-track tapes and cassettes? All vanished beneath a silvery avalanche of CDs. Now the next big thing had arrived, with a devastating reality for the retailers that had helped carry the industry through decades of unrelenting growth.

"This was the first format we couldn't carry," Currier says, simply.

And just like that, everything changed. Profits turned to steep losses. Album sales -- even in the digital format -- collapsed. Legions of record stores vanished. For Currier, the economic realities hit home in 2007 when he closed the shiny, expansive store on Northwest 23rd Avenue. Then the layoffs began.

"We didn't change as quickly as we could have. Our sales were down by 30 percent, and our expenses have probably doubled -- wages, utilities, insurance."

And still, the beat goes on.

A week before Christmas, the East Burnside store was jammed with customers, many loaded down with arms full of old-fashioned vinyl albums. And not just the golden oldies, either. The vinyl resurgence is a youthful rebellion, part musical (for vinyl's deeper bottom end and a warmer, less digitized sound) and part corporate rebellion. And Portland, Currier points out, is a particularly good place to build a rich collection of used vinyl. After all, Millennium helped so many people build such large and varied collections in the '70s and '80s.

Standing amid shelves stacked high with CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray movies, music magazines, independent weeklies and the modern iterations of the same stuff that enraptured the 17-year-old boy he once was, Currier refuses to surrender to the dark future so many other industry figures see.